Darth Fluffy

Yeah, but you're from Flurdah, you're like two or three inches above your water table normally. And how do you have ducks? Don't the pelicans eat them?

I like this one. I can relate.

Eddittin' iz herd werks. ...an ay et yer maus.

Ah need tu edit mah capshun ...

I can accept that. Go back far enough and Utah was Lake Bonneville. The Midwest was an inland sea.

Dammit, I want to hear that wombat attack joke. "..., Humorus Wombate Combateum" Oh, crap, what am I going to do with two wombats slugging it out with squeaky hammers? ... , You Tube, duh, ... "The good news is, your video has attracted a ton of viewers, and your Wombat show is going into syndication." "The bad news is, the wombats have hired a lawyer, and are cutting you out." "..., mmm, this stew is great. What did you say you used?" "Wombat." "What on earth possessed you to try that?"

Too true, I can't argue that. I have to agree with you, I like the egregious use of parens to make intent clear. Hmm. Well, one thing I've noticed about regular expressions is there are variant schemes; inclusion in the core library should serve to consolidate that. Too useful to ignore. That is my impression, and I may quote you on that.

I haven't ordered paper checks for my current address (nor the previous two. The last time I needed one, it was easy enough to get one counter check, and they are free at the credit union, unlike a bank.

I'm not judging. It just, well, boggles my mind, I guess. But I get what you're saying. I tend to read it now and then. And get sucked in like I used to do Facebook. True story, I gave up Facebook a few years ago, and family have been nagging me to get on. So I finally did it, and Facebook made it oh so painful that I'm probably not going to follow through. 'For security reasons' you must jump through this hoop. Now, for 'more security reasons' you must jump through this hoop that we didn't tell you about previously. Orly? You need my photo because you'd recognize me out of a crowd, is it? Don't go away mad, Zucky, just #uC% off.

Ugh. If I was going to pull a Thomas Jefferson and cut a piece out of my Bible, that would be the thing I'd cut. Something's not right there. First off, it doesn't say 'species', that was not a term of the times. It says 'kinds' and does not elaborate. Ether way, it's still an enormous problem; if Noah saved a few root samples a few thousand years ago, how did they radiate into the multiplicity of species that we see today. Geographic distribution is an even harder problem for the narrative. How did the bulk of marsupials end up in Australia? Why are the species of the hemispheres so distinct? It all makes sense until you add the flood, then it no longer holds water. The flood narrative is not even unique to the Bible; it appears to be a retelling of earlier flood stories that were handed down. And, it is not stated to be an eye witness account. My take on it is that the style of the era had a component of hyperbole, 'Greatest fool evar!' might mean, 'It was a big flood'. 'It covered the whole world' might mean 'it was so bad, the whole town got wet'. <shrug> I'd make more sense than taking it verbatim. You've got to question the superlatives on general principles. 'Greatest flood evar!' - Orly? You've seen ALL THE OTHERS? You're absolutely certain that AN EXACT DUPLICATE WILL NOT OCCUR AND THEN BE TWO INCHES HIGHER? Sampson was the strongest man that ever lived. Orly? When were these tests done? Do you have the raw data that we can examine? Are you talking baseline Homo Sapiens, or are you including near relatives? Because some of them look awesome strong. 'But he slew hundreds with the jawbone of an ass!' Orly? Have you heard our president speak? Non-Christian example, 'Mohamed was the greatest prophet evar!' Orly? You've met all the others? What metric are you using for your comparison? Maybe you mean, "Of all the prophets, he said the best things about our culture." Meh, whatever floats your boat.

Words I never thought I'd see ...

... but, I'm trying to collect the set ....

I don't do banks if I can avoid it (USAA is an exception, because USAA is exceptional. You should be eligible, from your service. They have few facilities, but they are very used to dealing with extremely remote customers); but for the most part, every credit union I've been a member of pretty much works like one, without the screw you over mentality. (I grieve the deregulation of banks) Does yours not have direct deposit? It must. All you need is the routing number and your account number, should be on your share draft pseudochecks.

I feel like you're slacking by not adding me to the list for ' "loud car" ordinance'. Is the cute feline distracting you?

Yes! A Victrola! My grandmother had one. Hers was electric, though, with a motor for the turn table. I don't think it had any electronics at all. Pretty amazing acoustic design that it worked as well as it did. Relatively fat steel needle, too. So, I guess I scratch my head in puzzlement, "I think that old car might be laughing ... or it has asthma in it's carburetor."

Well, OK, but the music problem is taken care of ... unless maybe if you have a vacuum tube amplifier. The 'laugh' function on your Ford T is almost certainly on silicon. It's fried.

Generally, any round above 9mm is going to be powerful enough to damage the engine; or a .357 mag, which is 9 with a boost. If you really want to be sure, go .50 cal if you can afford it. You'd be better off, though, with an EMP burst to take out the electronics. Just make sure you have your own gear in a Faraday cage. If Thor is handy, calling down lightning would work.

"Fire futon torpedos!"

COBOL is good at what it did when it did it. That it is still in use is a good indication that managers do not understand how saving money up front can cost them greatly in the long run. But it is not unusable, especially for the relatively simple tasks demanded of it, and if the pay is good enough, sure, I'd do it. It wasn't hard to learn the one time I needed to fix something. That's not excusing much, is it? Hell, you wouldn't even have to write in COBOL; make a translation program. As far as C goes, C was groundbreaking in context; with respect to UNIX and a certain programing philosophy. That doesn't mean it's not with out it's faults. You can write clear code in C, but it lends itself to not do so; that's why there is so much verbiage in the C community with respect to how to properly format and comment your code. Because is needs to be addressed. Look, it's similar to a situation that you brought up, Dykstra's ranting about gotos. He makes a fair point, but there is a counterpoint; one of my instructors many years ago, teaching structured programming in Pascal, pointed out how using a goto to exit a loop could be the easiest to follow, if properly documented (now generally replaced by EXIT statements, this was a while ago). Yet I have seen the other side of this; cleaning up crappy, sloppy, cobbled together code. The first step is invariably to untwist the spaghetti. You CAN write clean code in C, I'll even bet YOU probably do. But it is by no means a given. Take note, this contest exists for C, not for Pascal, nor even COBOL, nor BASIC. What is strange about that question is that I'm fairly certain you could come up with a much better list than I could. I recall macros being interpreted other than how they were intended, and order of operation ambiguities. Good points. Fair, but core library is a major part of a language's identity. Refer back to "Why use Fortran?" That's a weak semantic argument. We are a collection of cells. That hardly describes us. That's a really bad example, and is a good answer for your "How is C error prone?" question. Not a bad example in the sense of not illustrating your point, more in the sense of letting a child play with a loaded gun. I'm sure there's a reason for it, but having a statement inside the loop modify the loop parameters ina way that is not transparent ... accident waiting to happen. I read something long ago about the development of Fortran; apparently, neither did the developers; they had only a vague notion of where they were headed. I think it's normal that subroutines only operate on the scope of the thing they are handling. They don't edit the calling routine.

I was wondering why with all those books on military that you didn't have a Jane's, now I see it.

"My buks!"

That is a good point; family, and " ... didn't want to come out again ...".

Isn't Sam now male all the time? I think it's possible she's just thinking about her reaction to Elliot in the present tense, as if she were reliving it in her head. On a re-read, Grace, on the other hand, is clearly taking her to mean Sam spilled the beans.

There are aspects of C which were very innovative when they were introduced; how it interfaces with its UNIX host; but the syntax sucks, it is error prone. If you've used it for twenty years, you know the quirks and avoid them, and you probably think in C, but your learning curve was steep. As you point out, much more verbose Pascal is a good teaching language, precisely because it is intrinsically clear, it says what it is doing. Point of fact, much pseudocode, in the thinking the problem through phase is essentially Pascal, which is then transcribed into, well, typically C, of some more recent variant. Additionally, Pascal among many languages handle much for the designer and coder. Bounds checking, for example. How often has C's lack of these features, reliance on the designer and coder to implement them, bitten your butt? Another point of fact, much of software, big packages, in the last decades has been written in C++; much of software, big packages, are plagues with memory leaks. Correlation is not causation, however I find it suspicious that the language family that leaves things up to the developer is the one with the issues. Yeah, but it goes fast! Yeah, because it is skipping many of the important steps. Doy! You've made mistakes in C because things did not work the way you thought they would, you just don't remember. C++ has even more pitfalls. But if you're a true believer, you aren't going to believe me. I don't hate C, I like it's contributions. But I'd rather use Pascal syntax. Regular expressions are one aspect where the obscure syntax seems warranted; the density makes it readable. But unfortunately, there is not just one consistent system of 'regular expressions', there is a base set and extensions. Such ambiguity is the bane of getting it done correctly. The presence of regular expressions in both should highlight the relationship. C <--> Unix <--> Perl Explicit tends to be less trouble than side effects, although see above, some things should automatically happen; bounds checking would in a sense be a side effect. I feel like we are coming from different universes here.

Y'know, in his own head, it probably is somehow Obama's fault. To paraphrase J. R. Ewing, "once you toss out reality, everything else is a piece of cake." (or $#17, one or the other)